Unheralded

LILLIAN CROOK: WildDakotaWoman — Today’s Music I’ve Been Listening

Cat Stevens and Eddie Vedder 2016

And the late great B.B. King (who grew up in the same area in Mississippi as my late father). If you are in the Indianola area, I highly recommend a visit to the B.B. King Museum.

And because I was young in the 1970s, there is always the epic Eagles Hotel California.” Yes, I have watched the film, “History of the Eagles.” I can completely relate to Jackson Browne playing a tune over and over and over on his piano until he finished a song.

And, oh yeah, I’ve been in love with Jackson Browne since I was in about sixth grade. I’ve put on a few highway miles traveling to see Jackson Browne in concert. Even crashed at my college roommate’s house in Minneapolis one time to see Browne. When I was an undergrad, I had a whole bunch of vinyl records and everyone on my floor in the dorm like to listen to my records. And this is a true story, I used Browne’s lyrics in one of my Composition assignments. (I remember the young professor kind of rolled his eyes, but he marked my paper with an A-plus.) Once, when Jim and I were in the Los Angeles area, I was hoping to visit the cool stone house in which Jackson Browne grew up. A picture of the house is on one of his album covers. Alas, we ran out of time — LA is a great big freeway.

Here’s a good one, live from Austin City Limits. These Days “Jackson Browne.

And here is the commencement program from Dickinson State when I received my undergraduate degree. (The wonders of digitization). Evidently, someone in my family took a photo of me at my graduation, with my parents.

Later, when I was in graduate school in Nashville (you know, that city in central Tennessee), I got really tired of people asking me if I went there to study country music. The other question that came up a lot was, “Why the heck did you go all the way from North Dakota to Nashville” to go to grad school?” A classmate of mine was from Winnipeg. I’m sure he got asked the same questions. His funny line was, “I came here to eat fried fried.” I guess I didn’t have a camera in those days, so I have almost no photos from that time period. Nashville was, at least in those days, known as the Athens of the South. It was explained to me that this was because there are so many colleges and universities there. The Athens part is why the replica of the Parthenon was built there, in a huge city park right across from Vanderbilt University.

These are the closest I have of pictures of me from that time period.

Don’t quote me on this, but I think that 2000 was the last year in which Dickinson State University published Prairie Smoke (the college annual). Somewhere in the years of the 1990s-2000s, I attended commencement (required) and wore my academic regalia (required). So far as I can tell, there are no photos of me in my Vanderbilt academic regalia. Oh well. I have my diploma so that is all I give a darn about.

And because all y’all might know I’ve been listening to more women musicians these days than, er, the other gender, here is Tish Hinojosa, singing the Staines classic, River.”

And none other but the inimitable (I learned that big word in grad school), Roseanne Cash to close out the day. One an old one, I don’t think I’ve seen before and the other, well, I’ll let Roseanne tell ya. Man Smart, Women Smarter” by Roseanne Cash

“She Remembers Everything”





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